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stood over me, the guilty young black man. My heart was pounding. I took a seat.
“Trevor, I don’t know if you know this,” Mr. Friedman said, “but Teddy was arrested the
other day.”
“What?” I played the whole thing again. “Teddy? Oh, no. What for?”
“For shoplifting. He’s been expelled, and he won’t be coming back to school. We know
there was another boy involved, and these officers are going around to the schools in the area
to investigate. We called you here because Mrs. Vorster tells us you’re Teddy’s best friend,
and we want to know: Do you know anything about this?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t know anything.”
“Do you know who Teddy was with?”
“No.”
“Okay.” He stood up and walked over to a television in the corner of the room. “Trevor,
the police have video footage of the whole thing. We’d like you to take a look at it.”
Fuuuuu​uuuuu​uuuuu​uuck.
My heart was pounding in my chest. Well, life, it’s been fun, I thought. I’m going to get
expelled. I’m going to go to jail. This is it.
Mr. Friedman pressed Play on the VCR. The tape started. It was grainy, black-and-white
security-camera footage, but you could see what was happening plain as day. They even had it
from multiple angles: Me and Teddy reaching through the gate. Me and Teddy racing for the
door. They had the whole thing. After a few seconds, Mr. Friedman reached up and paused it
with me, from a few meters out, freeze-framed in the middle of the screen. In my mind, this
was when he was going to turn to me and say, “Now would you like to confess?” He didn’t.
“Trevor,” he said, “do you know of any white kids that Teddy hangs out with?”
I nearly shat myself. “What?!”
I looked at the screen and I realized: Teddy was dark. I am light; I have olive skin. But
the camera can’t expose for light and dark at the same time. So when you put me on a blackand-white
screen next to a black person, the camera doesn’t know what to do. If the camera
has to pick, it picks me as white. My color gets blown out. In this video, there was a black
person and a white person. But still: It was me. The picture wasn’t great, and my facial
features were a bit blurry, but if you looked closely: It was me. I was Teddy’s best friend. I
was Teddy’s only friend. I was the single most likely accomplice. You had to at least suspect
that it was me. They didn’t. They grilled me for a good ten minutes, but only because they
were so sure that I had to know who this white kid was.
“Trevor, you’re Teddy’s best friend. Tell us the truth. Who is this kid?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t recognize him at all?”
“No.”
“Teddy never mentioned him to you?”
“Never.”
At a certain point Mrs. Vorster just started running through a list of all the white kids she
thought it could be.